In The Mood For
Love
Written and Directed by Wong Kar-Wai
Starring: Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung.
(opens 2/16 @ the Ritz)
* * * 1/2
(Three and One Half Stars)
'In The Mood For Love', fraught
with the sort of cinema rich techniques which excel in blurry, indistinct
concepts and situations (but in a good way), unearths a gold mine in exploiting
time and undefined space in undefined relationships. Playing shy, polite
personalities whose spouses have strayed - with each other - the luminous
actors Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung huddle in each other's personal space,
just barely impacting the other amidst the strife they're quietly enveloped
in.
There's an ancient, towering glimmer as he explains
to a friend that when you need to unload a secret, sometimes simply whispering
it into the abscess of an gigantic rock does the trick - - - a glimmer
which the straight-on, almost unmoving eyes of Tony Leung make into an
almost religiously intense epiphany; the kind of telling statement you
could almost sketch his character from memory for having heard.
Equivocally, Maggie Cheung bears the beautiful,
brooding swagger of a goddess compacted into reflective immensity, slyly
bending the rules of a rule less relationship with her careful, conscious
honor ability that's there - - - and is not.
The bold Won Kar-Wai, without script or structure
(so I've heard), fired hundreds of hours of question marks at his actors
only to find their very disheveled collisions making up answers to put
piece of puzzle to interlocking piece - before shape has come to the complementary
outer edges of these shards of beauty. Moments when the wailing cello score
mimics George Frederic Handel (calling to mind the climactic strings of
Kubrick's 'Barry Lyndon') - and consequently, as these sequences are arranged,
bring a passion to a hum (though on an interior level, the moments would
hum anyway) and find, in the most forgotten of seconds, more pow even,
than is garnered in the rare, exciting scenes of curiously ambiguous flirtation.
This reversal of passions is wildly successful and reminded me of just
how wonderful Kar-Wai (Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, Happy Together,
Ashes of Time) is at tying down a couple of actors and jerking a pause
in time, throwing their whole rumba off. 'In The Mood For Love' realizes
this interrupted rumba in a more concise, rewarding manner - without anything
off the wall - than I've seen Kar-Wai manage to date.
As a romance, 'In The Mood For Love' seems like
a pending friendship; as a story of comparison, it reads "possibility"
hanging in the air - more real than unreal. Like a sweet fog, rapturous
waves of intertwined and malleable "possibility" flow into these characters'
unsure hearts - and guide them towards each other - as they step in opposite
directions manifesting undecided, twofold emotions like it were second
nature.
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2001